Web Geeks For Hire

The Importance of Keywords

Keywords are important for Title tags. Your number one most important keyword, at the very least, should make its way into the tag somewhere. While 66% of experts polled in the SEOMOZ ranking felt that keywords in the title tags were very highly importance, 63% felt that a keyword as the first word was important.

Order of keyword in the Title tag is important for several reasons. First, take a look at the browser tabs you are reading this on. My browser (I'm using Chrome) has four active tabs open right now (four webpages). Each is showing 26 characters, and an ellipse (...) if the title goes longer. Each also shows a favicon - the small graphic which identifies a web property. When looking at my tabs, those first 26 characters are the most important - they are the ones I'll see at any quick glance up. If I have four pages open in separate tabs, but all pages are from the same website, the only way to distinguish which one I want to view is through that text. The difference between an About Us page, a Home page, a Blog and a Product page can be easily distinguishable, or extremely vague - all because of that text.

 

 

Now I'm opening ten more tabs. Chrome is only displaying eight characters, plus the ellipse. Just enough room for a space-savvy website such as Wikipedia (no ellipse, so they get that ninth character). With eight characters, suddenly that first word becomes even more important. If you have a page about mittens, there is a good chance that you want that word first.

 

 

Besides the tab space, those first word/s become even more important when you consider organic search. When you Google something (or Yahoo or Bing or Ask), the title comes up, as well as a description (we'll deal with the description in another blog post). But not only to your website... at least nine others, plus a host of advertisements. You need to stick out. And if someone is searching for mittens, they had better see "mittens," or you are going to be skipped right over.

 

How to Write a Good Title Tag

 

Writing a good Title tag doesn't take heroic knowledge or efforts - just the ability to think rationally and stay consistent. Most will tell you to stick to about 70 characters in the title tag. 

Just start with a keyword, add others if they are relevant, make the title readable, and add some sort of navigation showing where the user is. I tend to keep the site name appended to the end; it tells people where they are, but if it gets truncated out of the equation, that's okay - there's still the web page itself, the favicon, and the URL telling the user what site they are on. 

 

To demonstrate:

 

My mythical mittens site, which I'll call www.welovemittens.com (I checked, it doesn't exist), has a Home page, an About Us page, and a page selling a single type of mittens - the groovy mitten (keeping it simple, folks).

 

I have 70 characters, and need to make the most of them. A lot of people use the page name, since it's most likely already a keyword, first. This doesn't work as well for the home page. If you use:

 

Home | We Love Mittens

 

You are doing yourself a disservice; you put your main keyword at the end, and didn't really add anything. For the home page, I prefer the site name first, or only.

 

We Love Mittens

 

Keyword isn't first there, but is easily in the first 26 characters. If you like "home," you can add it to the end:

 

We Love Mittens | Home

 

But since we aren't using a lot of characters, we can use that to expand on the product if we would like to.

 

We Love Mittens - Home of the Groovy Mitten

 

or 

 

We Love Mittens | Discover Unique Mittens for the Whole Family (62 characters)

 

Well within the character limit, and does a much better job of selling your website! 

 

If you want to keep your keyword "mittens" first, just modify the above title a bit:

 

Mittens - We Love Mittens Helps You Find Unique and Stylish Mittens (67 characters)

 

For the inner pages, you have a few options. You can put the page name first, and bump the site name back a level (separated by a pipe, or hyphen), or rearrange. I like consistency, so I'll pretend that we went with this for the Home page:

 

We Love Mittens

 

Now for the About Us, we'll bump that back a "level" and insert the page name:

 

About Us | We Love Mittens

 

And for our product page:

 

Groovy Mitten | We Love Mittens

 

For third level and deeper pages, when content is usually much more specific, you can use a hyphen (-) or arrow (>) to indicate the overall subject. So if we had a product page at the second level:

 

Products | We Love Mittens

 

And then the Groovy Mitten was a subset of the products page, you could indicate as such:

 

Groovy Mitten > Products | We Love Mittens

 

Your are effectively separating a logical progression from the site name, so you always have brand presence and a limited navigation, while maintaining SEO value of the tag.

 

There are discussions all over about the proper form for the Title tag - my advice is to not think too deeply into form; concentrate on what is good for a user, and SEO value. If you find a site easy to understand through their title tags, make note and try it on your website.

 

Just stay consistent and don't be afraid to experiment.

 

If you have a format for the Title tag that has worked for you especially well, sound off in the comments area below!